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Based in Portland, OR, Dealers Supply was established in 1920. With high quality product lines, the largest inventory of any distributor location in the Northwest, Dealers Supply offers unmatched contractor and customer service.

The Challenge

Dealers Supply Company has been a staple in the Portland building materials community since 1920. They fostered a tradition of customer satisfaction and customer focus, however, their current business software was preventing them from perpetuating this tradition. Inventory was not being efficiently tracked and AR invoices were handwritten while checks were typed up on a typewriter. “If a customer wanted to know how many Red shingles they ordered so far this year, it was nearly impossible to tell them,” says Tammy Hobrecht, Controller for Dealers Supply. After the realization that they would need to update their software, Dealers Supply looked to DMSi for a solution that meshed with their business model.

The Solution

Dealers Supply can trace their roots back to a small feed and seed distributor that was founded in 1920 in the Portland area. What started as a small family owned business grew into a thriving business that is on its 4th generation of family ownership. Much of their success can be attributed to their highly motivated and dedicated employees and the focus on customer service. To this end, they have had minimal reliance on technology, instead maintaining the personal touch of handwritten invoices and no computers at the front desk.

However, as their business expanded, Dealers Supply realized they needed a software that offered them real-time reporting as well as AR, AP and inventory control, something their current software could not do, “We’ve struggled with changing our company processes to accommodate what our software will not do. It gets frustrating,” Hobrecht mentions. Their main concern was that they did not want technology to come between the people and their business, and they needed a software company that felt the same way. Dealers Supply is a long time member of NEMEON and looked to their peers for suggestions. This led them to DMSi, a company that emphasized the people side of the business and was proud to be a product of American innovation.

Dealers Supply implemented Agility in early 2012. Since then, they have come to realize what a benefit having real-time information is to their business. “We were really looking for a system that required fewer steps to acquire information, specifically real-time information. Not only does Agility do this, but it also helps eliminate some manual bookkeeping procedures and gives us multiple useful tools to manage inventory and makes it less painful and difficult to make changes to information,” says Hobrecht.

Agility’s reporting features were one of the things that drew Dealers Supply in. For example, “We have a customer who would like to know how much product from a certain vendor they have purchased in 2009, 2010, 2011 and YTD 2012. My current software only stores 24 periods, so I would never be able to compare a 3rd year to current,” describes Hobrecht, “But now with about 5 clicks in Agility Viewer, we can give that customer the information over the phone while they wait.”

With a planned expansion to a 160,000- square-foot facility in the next year, Dealers Supply will rely on Agility to keep their business current, but allow them to continue their culture of face-to-face customer service and the individual attention that is unmatched in the industry.

“We were really looking for a system that required fewer steps to acquire information, specifically real-time information. Not only does Agility do this, but it also helps eliminate some manual bookkeeping procedures and gives us multiple useful tools to manage inventory and makes it less painful and difficult to make changes to information.” -Tammy Hobrecht, Controller, Dealers Supply Company

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Agility

The ideal platform for people who supply building products for their living.
Agility is the #1 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for the building materials industry. Every aspect of operations is covered; from production/procurement through distribution, delivery, and back office accounting. More than 400 building material wholesalers, remanufacturers, …